


The Dragon Heist

by frazzledsoul



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Humor, Ashara is the distant social media influencer mom from hell, Brienne is Tormund's baby mama, Dany was Jon's unintentional teenage beard, F/F, F/M, I just wanted to write a sitcom plot with a happy ending and this is the result, Jon Snow is Not a Targaryen, Jon is gay AF, M/M, N + A equals J, it starts off serious at first but descends into crack pretty quickly, just for the record I'm deleting any tag policing so don't bother, so I hereby defend its place in the tags, technically a crack fic, their past relationship is the main reason the plot exists, there are lots of Jon/Tormund/Brienne coparenting shenanigans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:07:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24732088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frazzledsoul/pseuds/frazzledsoul
Summary: When bartender (and single dad) Tormund Giantsbane falls for art student Jon Snow, what he thought was destined to be a fling turns into something far more serious. It isn't long until they are engaged. However, integrating their friends, family (and exes) into their new life may turn out to be more of a challenge than either of them anticipated.
Relationships: Arya Stark/Gendry Waters, Daenerys Targaryen/Jon Snow (past), Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Other Relationships Not Mentioned In Tags - Relationship, Sansa Stark/Margaery Tyrell, Tormund Giantsbane/Brienne of Tarth (past), Tormund Giantsbane/Jon Snow, Ygritte/Edd Tollett
Comments: 7
Kudos: 41





	1. The Many Loves of Tormund Giantsbane

Tormund didn’t intend to get seriously involved with anyone when he moved to King’s Landing.

It had been a rough couple of years. Hell, the entire last decade had been its own special blend of unexpected pleasure and slow, turgid, relentless episodes of confusion and pain. That was adulthood, he supposed. Always one damn thing after another. It seemed that he’d experienced much more of the latter than the former.

He had left Hardhome twelve years ago straight out of high school, full of bluster and bravado, not caring about much else but getting to know something other than the same struggling people and places he’d known all of his life. He supposed it would only last for a season or two: that was the pull that the North had on you. You might leave for a year or two, but those people, that land, those bonds always stayed with you. You knew you’d always end up returning to them.

He ventured down to Tarth to stay with some older friends, hoping to trade in his inevitable role as a struggling fisherman back home for the possibility of making it in a place where he had a chance to prosper. He never succeeded much at the fishing part of it, but he did end up unexpectedly courting the daughter of one of the scions of Evenfall society.

Well, unexpectedly for Brienne, maybe. Tormund knew the minute he saw her that she would be a challenge that he’d do his best to conquer.

There was quite a bit of class envy and bitterness mixed in with lust and affection at the beginning. Brienne was six years older than him, taking a break after college before deciding whether or not to go on to law school and working as a fencing instructor. Her father hated that they were together from the start. He suspected that appealed to Brienne as much as it had to him. She had long been rejected from upper-class society for being too tall, too ungainly, too athletic, too oblivious to the social niceties expected of her. Brienne loved her dad, but she had grown tired of playing the docile only child to her sole surviving parent. She was riding high on a long-delayed rebellion, and Tormund was only too happy to help her along.

She was a warrior. Fierce, fearless, apologetic. That’s what had drawn Tormund to her. And after a little while, it started to feel like love. She was pregnant within six months and they were married before a year had passed. Tormund was exhilarated rather than terrified at the prospect of teenage fatherhood, bragging to everyone he knew about their spawn being fearsome beasts that would take over the world.

(His daughters’ future field hockey foes would come to know that truth in due time. He had been right about a few things).

Alsi had come the first year, followed by Magritte eleven months later. Brienne was far more cautious by that point. It was quickly becoming apparent that the few things that they did have in common weren’t enough to outweigh the things that they didn’t.

They split up for good when Magritte was three. Brienne and the girls moved back in with her father, and she decided to finally enroll in law school. He stuck around for the next few years before retreating back home, ostensibly to look after his ailing parents. The truth was that there just wasn’t a place for him in Tarth anymore, and it was time to return where he belonged.

He didn’t think he would miss the girls as much as he did. They were agile little monsters, spitfires of energy and mirth and spontaneity, and they were his. They had his red hair and his blue eyes and the hellraiser nature that flowed through his Northern veins. Nothing that had felt like home to him as a teenager was the same without them, and the summers and the alternating holidays they spent with him were never enough time.

By the time he wanted to leave again, he couldn’t: his mother was losing a vicious battle with cancer, and his father couldn’t handle it on his own. Tormund tried to keep things going with construction work and occasional bartending once the local factory closed down, but it was almost always more than he could take to keep their heads above water. He’d fallen into a relationship with Sandor Clegane by then, and he knew he couldn’t walk out on him, either. He had to trust on the things in his life that were tangible, even if the rest of it was growing increasingly difficult to endure.

Six months after his mother passed, his father died of a heart attack. Things were over with Sandor by then. Tormund knew he’d loved and cared for him in a way he hadn’t been able to with Brienne. Maybe it was age or maturity. Maybe he’d learned from his failed marriage. Maybe Sandor was able to be there for him exactly when he needed it, and Tormund was finally able to return that affection.

Maybe it was because Sandor was a man. Tormund wasn’t sure. He’d never gotten serious with men in the past, and he hadn’t had any relationships with women that lasted even as long as that first heady year with Brienne. He felt he should had learned something from the way he and Sandor had gradually grown apart, and amicably separated, but he wasn’t sure what it should have been.

There was nothing here for him anymore. Brienne had moved to King’s Landing and remarried after graduating from law school, and Tormund began to contemplate moving closer to the girls. He had always hated the idea of moving that far south (and to a such an overwhelmingly congested city), but he didn’t want his daughters to grow up with Jaime Lannister as their only father figure. When his childhood friend Ygritte suggested that he work for her as a bartender, he reluctantly took her up on the opportunity.

That first night, Jon Snow walked in to celebrate his 21st birthday, and his entire life changed.


	2. A New Kind of Family

Jon Snow was something of an elusive fantasy come true.

He was young, lithe, and gorgeous, with his porcelain skin, silky raven curls, and enormous brown eyes that were simultaneously comforting and enticing. He had a velvet Northern brogue, which was something that Tormund didn’t think he’d ever find in this accursed city. He could knock back several whiskies straight and patiently listened to Tormund tell story after story, even though he had brought an unruly pack of drunken friends with him to the bar and their designated driver was busy chatting up Ygritte and quickly becoming undesignated.

And he was Dornish. Dornish with an ass that wouldn’t quit. Dornish sensibilities and a Northern accent? Tormund had only dreamed of such a rare male specimen.

Tormund only learned a few things that first night. Jon was an art student at Kings Landing University, he was the oldest of six siblings, he was born in Starfall but he’d grown up mostly in Wintertown, and he’d moved to Kings Landing right before high school. He loved hockey but he rooted for the Wintertown Wolves over the Night’s Watchmen, mostly because the NW had cut his uncle after his first season due to a knee injury. Usually Watch fans were a deal-breaker, but Tormund would definitely make an exception for Jon anyway: their mutual hatred of the Watch only made him more infatuated.

Jon and Tormund retired to his borrowed room in Ygritte’s apartment at the end of the night, and Tormund spent hours mapping out every inch of Jon’s body.

The next morning, Jon stumbled out of Tormund’s bedroom at almost the same moment that his friend Edd stumbled out of Ygritte’s, grumbling about his hangover.

Jon gave him a few smacks on the head over his broken promises before retreating behind the kitchen counter to help Ygritte cook pancakes. It was only then that Tormund learned they’d been best friends since Jon’s first day of high school.

It set a certain pattern for Tormund’s life for the next few years. And that was the last thing he expected out of life in King’s Landing.

He kept waiting for Jon to get bored and back off. Jon had his whole life ahead of him: why would he want to attach himself to someone who was thirty years old, divorced, and had two pre-teen daughters to raise? It confused him even more when he learned that Jon’s father was Ned Stark, heir to a shipping fortune up North and a former diplomat. What was Jon even doing with him? He’d been the recipient of a rich kid’s slumming experiment with Brienne, and that had ended in almost complete disaster. There was no possible way it could work with someone from a completely different world, could it?

Jon didn’t back off. And as the weeks and months passed by, Tormund began to kick himself for ever believing that he would ever want to. Jon was something very special indeed: witty, passionate, trusting, and good. Once Jon decided you were one of the people he wanted to protect, he ferociously devoted himself to your side and was willing to give up almost anything for it. Tormund learned to count himself unbelievably lucky that Jon had chosen him to be one of those people.

Jon wasn’t living the same kind of life that most affluent college kids (and Kings Landing University had plenty of those) did. His father had quit politics the previous year and moved back home with Jon’s stepmother and his two youngest brothers after his brother Bran had become paralyzed in a car accident. Jon was sharing a house with his sisters Sansa and Arya as well as Sansa’s girlfriend Margaery and her daughter Aeria. The whole set-up was primarily for Arya’s benefit: she had proclaimed that if her parents had forced her to move back home, she’d run back to King’s Landing on her own and would quit school for good and move in with her much older boyfriend Gendry. The plan was to keep Arya in school until she graduated, with the hopes that three slightly older adults (as well as the occasional presence of their brother Robb, who was living in a separate apartment with his girlfriend) would keep her under control.

Jon had his doubts. Arya was enrolled in trade school for the time being, which Ned tolerated and his stepmother Catelyn hated. It had been Jon’s idea: he was mostly enrolled in university himself for practical reasons, as his real goal was to make and sell his own furniture. He figured if they could get Arya settled in a job where she could support herself, the less likely she was to follow through on her earlier threats. He didn’t know if she’d make it. She was more stubborn than the rest of the family combined, and they were known for being fairly intractable on their own.

If there was anything that Tormund could intensely relate to, it was being thrust with overwhelming responsibility and having to fumble one’s way through it. He was doing the same thing himself in learning to be a fully present dad again. When he had left Alsi and Magritte to go back home, they had been pigtailed little girls when he had left who were just learning to tie their shoes and ride their bikes without training wheels. Now they were almost teenagers. He had to deal with smartphones and homework and field hockey schedules and boyfriends and it was all more than a little intimidating. And yet Jon was right there with him every step of the way, to yell at the other field hockey dads and walk him through setting blocks on the girls’ phones and to snarl menacingly at Jaime Lannister as a united front. Alsi and Magritte were learning to accept them as a team. It felt a million times better to be doing it with someone who was there because he chose him, instead of knowing the other person was forcing themselves through it because they didn’t see a way out.

Things were better with Brienne this time. She loved Jon and even bonded with his siblings. When Tormund moved out of Ygritte’s apartment after a few months (and Edd moved in), she helped set up the girls’ room and helped Tormund negotiate the lease. When she had some medical issues a few weeks later, Tormund kept the girls on his own for nearly two weeks while she recovered and they agreed to relax their custody arrangement to allow the girls to trade off weeks with both of them. It wasn’t long before Tormund, Brienne, and Jon were yelling in unison at bad calls during the girls’ field hockey games.

Soon after that, Ygritte, Edd, and Jon’s entire family could be found bellowing beside them.

* * *

Shortly after Jon and Tormund’s first anniversary, three momentous things happened: Jon graduated from university and got a job teaching at Arya’s trade school, Brienne quit her job at the DA’s office and opened up her own fencing academy, and Arya convinced Jon to let her get her GED, move in with Gendry, and go work with Brienne. Her parents were a harder sell, but they trusted Jon and Sansa’s judgment. Arya technically may have only been seventeen, but she was as settled as she was going to be. They needed to stop trying to mold her into someone she was not.

Jon knew that struggle too well from his own adolescent attempts to come to terms with himself.

The timing was right for Tormund. He’d loved Jon almost immediately, only to be to be stunned that Jon actually returned that affection and wanted to share Tormund’s life with him. King’s Landing had seemed like a place where he was destined to be a perpetual outsider, but Jon had changed all of that. He belonged here now. He wanted to set down roots, enjoy his girls for the few years that they had left, and he wanted to do it by Jon’s side as long as he would have him.

Tormund bought a small forest cabin in what remained of the Kingswood, and he asked Jon to move in with him. Jon said yes immediately.

Soon after that, they made a visit to a woman that Jon rarely spoke of: the illustrious Ashara Dayne, currently filming a reality show in Sunspear that Jon did his best to ignore the existence of completely.

Tormund and Jon had been dating for over a month before Jon admitted she was his mother.

It wasn't until Tormund met her in person that he finally understood why.


End file.
